Thermo-mechanical safety analyses of preliminary design experiments for 238Pu production

Christopher J. Hurt; James D. Freels; Prashant K. Jain; G. Ivan Maldonado

doi:10.1115/1.4041269

Thermo-mechanical safety analyses of preliminary design experiments for ²³⁸Pu production

Christopher J. Hurt, James D. Freels, Prashant K. Jain, G. Ivan Maldonado

Nuclear Energy and Fuel Cycle Division

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Safety analyses at the high flux isotope reactor (HFIR) are required to qualify experiment targets for the production of plutonium-238 (²³⁸Pu) from neptunium dioxide/aluminum cermet (NpO2/Al) pellets. High heat generation rates (HGRs) due to fissile material and low melting temperatures require a sophisticated set of steady-state thermal simulations in order to ensure sufficient safety margins. These simulations are achieved in a fully coupled thermo-mechanical analysis using COMSOL MULTIPHYSICS for four different preliminary target designs using an evolving set of pre- and postirradiation data inputs, and subsequently evolving solution scopes, from the unique pellet and target designs. A new comprehensive presentation of these preliminary analyses is given and revisited analyses of the first prototypical target designs are presented to reveal the effectiveness of evolving methods and input data.

Original language	English
Article number	011002
Journal	Journal of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science
Volume	5
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4041269
State	Published - Jan 2019

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of this work provided by the U.S. Department of Energy as well as the Research Reactors Division, and additional support from the Reactor and Nuclear Systems Division and Nuclear Security and Isotope Technology Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This material is based upon work supported, in part, under an Integrated University Program Graduate Fellowship. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The U.S. government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for U.S. government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan.

Funders	Funder number
U.S. Department of Energy
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Keywords

Comsol multiphysics
HFIR
heat transfer
multiphysics
structural mechanics

Access to Document

10.1115/1.4041269

Cite this

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